Category Archives: Work

Goddamnit, Annie. Goddamnit, America.

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Annie and I were fighting in that way you can fight with people you’ve known for awhile. She thought I was blissfully optimistic and, in expressing that, was disrespectful of people in difficult positions. I was also not good at being a friend at a distance. I thought she was being overly rash and weird. She was upset that I thought her that un-self aware. We dropped it when my dad went into surgery, and we didn’t bring it up when I offered to help pay for a medical visit when she collapsed recently. I thought it was anxiety. She refused to get treatment because her insurance wouldn’t kick in until today. Today. She disliked this country, for the same reasons she died in it. It doesn’t take care of its people.

terrorists

She was the lynchpin of our sharebro group, bringing together these strange collections of people around long-form analysis and banter. And when Google Reader went away, she was the one who pushed to find a new space, and brought us back together again on The Old Reader. In all these deep conversations, Annie was still hard to know. Intensely private. Irate when images were captured without consent. Always interrogating the blasé assumptions of sharing, preferring it as an act of intentionality rather than of status quo.

I met Annie not too long after moving to Seattle, a long-time friend of some of the Bloomington Diaspora. She was this persistently present enigma in our shared social circle that I didn’t take the time to get to know more. She didn’t take on casual friends, and I have trouble interacting with people unless it’s on a project. We talked about ideas and society on Reader, but never really got to know about what was in our ribs, sticking to what was in our skulls. Annie was an intimidating intellectual sparring partner, steadfast in her outrage at The Patriarchy and Capitalism.

Some rant she went on about if games were useful for things other than play, and about gender, and about all sorts of other things sparked a “what would it take to fix this?” conversation. We met at Jigsaw, a block away from us both, for what we thought would be a few hours of talking. Instead we launced GameSave together. For 3 months, we shared a project. We lived across the alley from each other, and I would walk up the appallingly uneven steps to the back door of her building, she and Gretchen just back from their walk. She would make eggs and coffee, her apartment in the colors I now recognize as the Icelandic pallet. She conceded to playing my “fairy glitch” as opposed to her preferred metal, sitting for hours at a time on her awful futon. We talked through what was possible in disaster and humanitarian response, and what was people-dependent, and what large-scale logistics supported through crowds and gaming structure would look like. We took on a seemingly impossible project, and pulled it off. I was proud to live up to what she saw as possible.

And one night, tired of working, we binged on YachtRock and Aquavit, and actually opened up to each other. She was a person, and she was my friend, and she was utterly, utterly stubborn. I didn’t know her nearly as well as some of the other Seattle crew, but I knew her more than most, and that was an honor to hold.

I bought a plane ticket when Lindsay called. I didn’t know if I’d be taking a watching round at the hospital or holding people’s hands, having mine be held. It’s the latter.

So I’m sitting in the last Seattle coffee shop I saw her in, wondering what of our shared experiences are for my public tendencies, and what are to keep in my ribs, strangely territorial of the the grief I feel for this intensely private person. I hope to help make the world that wouldn’t have let her die for lack of money. I hope to not alienate the people unlike me by failing to include them in that language. I hope to live up to what she saw as possible.

Annie's feelings on creatures

Goddamnit, Annie.

Open Badges for Crisis Response

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Just before the Dublin Hacks event, I found myself in London for Mozfest, the yearly conference for Mozilla. I was there to wander and schmooze, but then I met Jess Klein (now listed on our Who-Is page!). She was working on HackLabs in disaster areas, based on her experience during Hurricane Sandy. What would be needed in any kit (software of space-wise) deployed in times of disaster? It’s a good question asked by many intelligent people who encounter disaster. Because of GWOB’s exposure to so many such people and groups, it’s also a question we know is huge, and one that we create parts and pieces of constantly. Through deep conversation over a couple hours, we dug down deeper: what is a missing component our crew was especially well equipped to deal with at Mozfest?

The Emergency Hacklab team discussed just this question. What we came up with was this: a way for residents in an affected area to indicate someone has helped them. This helps deal with the disconnect between responders and the good work they aim to do.

In times of crisis, there is a desperate need to open up emergency/disaster response data. Communities rush to aid and collaborate both online and in person. There is a convergence of new technology, open source methodologies and grassroots activism. The Emergency Hack Lab tackled the question of how to credential, task and thank volunteers. The UN OCHA offices released an open data set of disaster badges. In a fast paced sprint, our team hacked and built proto-workflow for the UN OCHA Noun Project sets (official process) to the Mozilla Open Badges program. More details from Jessica Klein, Creative Lead, Mozilla Open Badges.

Things we’re super excited about:
This wasn’t about reinventing the wheel, it was about doing something innovative with existing pieces. We pulled from the UNOCHA Noun Project page. We are building a badging triage system that can function on top of existing grassroots and relief technology such as the Participatory Aid Marktplace and Frontline SMS using Mozilla Open Badges.

What’s next:

  • Code the SMS system prototype that is detailed in the userflow here:

  • Partnering with existing grassroots and relief orgs to make sure what we build can sit on top of their technology
  • User test the utility of the UNOCHA badges as we have hacked them out here: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/emergency-badges
  • Join us for the OpenBadges call about this Jan 29 – details here

Do we have a plan for deploying this? Testing it?

  • We are looking for volunteers to join our usertesting cohort.
  • We are working with the Hive Learning Network to usertest and paper prototype
  • People all over the world have expressed interest in this including Global Minimum who have offered to work with us to user test once we have a prototype

Learn more at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Emergencyhacklab and http://jessicaklein.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/community-aid-badging.html

If you are interested in working on this project – please let us know:

Encrypting Communications

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Being in Berlin reminded me that I haven’t been around the hackers I know and love since my last round of gadget aquirement. A lot of conversations have been happening recently around the usability of crypto-aware tools (including an event in DC on Jan 11th that GWOB is doing with OpenITP – you should go!). What we fail to talk about are how easy many existing things are out there, and what they are. Here are some things we did:

Encrypt all the things!

Why this matters: when interacting with law enforcement, you can plead the 5th around your password, but the hardware itself can be seized, albeit sometimes for a short time. During this, they can take an image of your disk, IE, scan and copy anything on it. By encrypting your device, all they will see is adsfliu9p8aerkadfov8c79234hfgia etc instead of “ohai.”
File Vault

  • A Mac. It’s not as hard as you think. With a solid state drive, it takes about 45 minutes. Let it run tonight while you head to bed. For a Mac, plug it in, launch System Preferences > Security and Privacy > File Vault > Encrypt.
  • An Android. Also not difficult. Settings > Security > Encrypt Device. Again, you’ll need to leave it plugged in and have a bit of patience with it.

Password Management

Why this is important: helps you not fall into password reuse issues by allowing you to only remember one strong password, and loading in non-human-memorable passwords.
On Mac, I went for 1Password. It costs some money, but it’s hella easy to use, and I can share an encrypted file via dropbox between my multiple devices so I can still access accounts. While I’m plugging in these accounts to 1Password, I’m slowly changing all my less-secure passwords for randomized ones.

Communications

Why this is important: While we’ve achieved HTTPS in most places, within and between larger “clouds” data is not actually sent encrypted. In order for you to maintain your privacy, it’s important for anything you send to be encrypted. All of these are usable in the exact same way from a user standpoint as the things they replace. They just also encrypt the traffic. Try them out.

I already use Adium for Off The Record (OTR) and Thunderbird for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) on my Mac. I’d use Jitsi but it crashes anytime I’ve tried. Waiting until it works. That said, I also want the messages I send on my phone to be encrypted.

  • ChatSecure : chat on phone
  • TextSecure : already installed, but worth mentioning
  • Threema : also encrypts images etc! Let me know if you’re on it, definitely needs critical mass in order to be usable. Willow is K69NNHXE
  • Orweb : Tor browser on phone
  • Orbot : Tor node on phone

<3 to all the fine folk who helped out with this : Tomate, Herr Flupke, Morgan.

Diggz of Tropo and Geeks Without Bounds

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Who are you?
Johnny Diggz. Chief Evangelist for Tropo. And a piano player. And GWOB.

What do you think about hackathons?

I’ve been participating in them in one way or another for almost four years. Used to do what is similar to a hackathon back in the early 2000s, but they were much more vendor workshops than what I’d consider a hackathon today. First of the modern day ones was an OpenGov hackathon in August of 2010. The company I work for, Tropo (API) is always looking for different ways to get our API in front of developers, both from a revenue perspective and as instant feedback from new developers looking at our product for the first time, so we sponsor events and offer prizes at hackathons to give developers incentive to try Tropo.  In doing so, we have an opportunity to first-hand watch a developer use our API and documentation from never knowing what we do, to implementing and see the pain points. Good point for us to get feedback. Also fun!

How many have you attended?

What role did you fill at each of those (orga, facilitation, mentor, speaker, etc)
In the last 3 years I’ve participated in over 100 hackathons.
Everything from complete facilitator role – I pick the venue, the food, running the show. Main organizer. Done some where I show up as a sponsor. Give a little pitch about Tropo. Workshop or an intro, stay on hand to assist with developer questions, hand out some tshirts and perhaps a prize (sometimes participating as a judge as well). Or signing up and participating as a developer.

Do you think of the events you hold as hackathons?

If not, what is your event, and what makes it that?
It’s a broad term. Sense that it’s thrown out there for a variety of different types of events. Code sprints, hackathons, codeathons, tinkerstorms. Different varieties of a set of challenges are put in front of developers, and/or a set of tools, challenged to come up with something innovative. Or specific vertical like open data, city data, NASA data (those are tools). Tools as software API vendors. Give a prize to that.  Sometimes they are centered around specific technologies, like a platform such a Drupal or a language like Ruby.

What do you think the purpose of a hackathon is?

For software vendor / service providers and sponsors it’s a marketing exercise. Feedback. I show up to rep, I’m constantly giving feedback to our support team. our engineers. Until you can sit down and go through the pain points through another set of eyes. Things you thought were QA weren’t. “Why would you click that?” Well..
If you’re a developer, it’s great for your network. Get your startup, meet other developers.
If it’s a specific type of hackathon, like social good, there’s potential you’ll develop something that will help improve quality of life or save lives.

What do projects look like for your event?

Common type is a weekend event. 48 +/- hours to develop your idea into something that is demo-able. For the most part, teams struggle to get something that is barely demo-able. You end up with a prototype that may have some features that work. Scramble at end to include as many APIs as possible to garner prizes. Tack on things that may not be a part of the core functionality. Xboxes, drones. There are some devs I see time and time again that I would say are professional hackathon-ers. They go after the prizes. Some companies offer big cash prizes. Full fledged application ready to be used is rare. Requires a team to keep going, unless they came to the ahackathon to further it.

What has happened to projects from the events you’ve been to?

OpenGov hackathon as part of Gnomedex, a team came up from Portland – Aaron and Amber. LoqiMe says you can text into a number and it’ll put your location on a map. Ended up launching a startup off of that. Now been acquired by ESRI. GroupMe came out of a hackathon out of NY. Now in Skype. Smaller things like The Pineapple Project that are generated out of a NASA hackathon initially. Still going on, members of the group come in and out. Each hackathon they add a little functionality to the project.

Industry vs Cause

Just did one in NY that was more of an API focused. SendGrid and Tropo and TokBox. Each has different APIs. Photo API to look up photos by keywords. Our Tropo API is a communications API. TokBox is video communications API. Mashery was there. Bloomberg was there. Challenge in those types of events is, from a developer’s perspective, how many of these can I mash up to build something? Include for prizes, to learn, networking. Prize motivation to get the year’s free GitHub service or whatever the prizes are for that event. Cause-based ones are less prize focused. I spent a weekend improving my city government services. Getting out an app to farmers on what crops to use. Vision impaired people on making websites easier to use. Still have prizes, but motivation is social good.  API vendors are there for these, but less competitive, more cooperative. Use best tool for the job.

What are the attendees of your events like?

What do they get out of the event?
Changed from geographic region to region. Bay area is where I have the most experience. SF Bay. Typically male. 4:1 ratio of male to female. Typically white male. Younger, in their 20s. Don’t get high school students. Older folks have other things in their life. 20 somethings have the weekends free. (I realize I’m stereotyping here, but just giving my personal observations). Different hackathons cater to different groups of people. EveryoneHacks series is focused more on the less served groups that might want to go to hackathons, also newbies. If you’ve never done one before.. the term hackathon has gotten less threatening over recent years, but people immediately think “hackers” and stealing my bank account or identity. When I was in the Phillieans, much for 50/50 genderwise, much younger – high school students. Really depends on where and type of event.  Fairly male dominated type of event. Challenging for organizers to try to attract people who haven’t ever been to one, might be itimidated. Can be brogrammy – I try to avoid those.

Tell me your favorite story from an event.

My experience at the second one we participated with (RHoK) in Seattle in June 2011. Which was one of the larger ones I participated in helping to organize. I really thought that the overall energy and the quality of the hacks.. it’s a social good event, Random Hacks of Kindness.. It was the first time I saw a combination of OpenData and physical hardware (soldering was involved!).  The participants were really energized.  We had people from Microsoft and NASA and local emergency responders, and I felt like it was one of the most positive events I’ve ever participated in.

Do you see yourself as a part of a wider movement?

How do you connect with other folk from that movement?
I do. Every weekend, there are hundreds of these across the globe each weekend. Wasn’t true a few years ago. The concept of social good hackathons has been blowing up. Maybe 2-3 years ago there were maybe 2-3 a year. Now a bunch of companies are jumping on the bandwagon. Which is good. But with too many, you lose.. there’s a potential for burnout for participants because they can’t do them every weekend. But multiple hackathons are happening in the same city, developers leaving one to submit the same app in both hackathons. There’s almost a competition for attendees. Angelhack is arguably the largest ongoing hackathon. Global, they have events nearly every weekend in every city. They’ve taken the whole concept of hackathon and really comercialized it. They have 400 people at their events. Almost too large, I think. Because as a judge (another role I play).. in Berlin, we had to sit through 70 demos. At the end of 3 hours, I didn’t care. Same hack from 3 different people, 3 different teams. Having been a mentor, advisor, etc to large organizations like RHoK and AngelHacks and SpaceApps, EveryoneHacks, these are global events I’ve had strategic input in advising and guiding and participating in.. I’d say yes. There are a few of us who have participated in this for as long as it’s been a movement. I’ll be intereseted to see when this movement started. When I came back into tech in 2010, I know it was going, so know I didn’t start it, but I helped grow it to where it is today. had influence. Not like I’m doing a research project on it. Done public speaking about hackathons at things like SXSW, worked with AT&T, RHoK, etc. Lots of big ones, little ones.

Are hackathons accomplishing something?

One overall purpose that hackathons do achieve is education in technology. One universal thing, whether it’s social good or social enterprise or.. people end up learning more about technology than they knew before. A skill, an API, form a connection, a work connection, not just technology stuff but design.. you get exposed to a wide array of people. When I was a kid growing up, there would be gifted program classes. Me and some other kids would do non traditional school things like play with LEGOs. What I think a good analogy of what a hackathon is. Get people in a room, give them some challenges, some coffee, take a step back and watch what happens. They want to learn, engage, build things. Universal thing hackathons are good at. Whether that’s their intended purpose, that is what is happening.

Anything Else?

Interested in the history. Workshops at conferences in 2000, 2001. The Gnomedex hackathon : I didn’t know what I was doing, and I read a lot of the internet about what they *should* be. The agenda I put together was not too far from what we do today. Maybe I invented the modern day hackathon agenda…I have no idea. Amber and Aaron were doing civic hackathons before then.
Organizations like Code For America. That is less that 4 years old. Geeks Without Bounds.

Creating (New) Collaborative Spaces

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There’s this ongoing sense of frustration from the adaptive, iterative, inclusive informal side of disaster response with the formal side. While we often focus on how to get members of a population not accustomed to collaboration to feel empowered to speak and act, and that is a core component of any work I do, that’s not what this entry is about. In the same way that I think many people don’t engage in their environments when conflict is a possible component, I think the lack of collaborative and codesign approach in the formal sector is simply a lack of exposure and understanding.

Come with me / and we’ll be / in a land of pure collaboration – sung to the tune of Willy Wonka’s “Pure Imagination“

The thing to understand is that after Kindergarten, most people have been discouraged from being collaborative. While it comes easily in our youth, when we haven’t built up the skills (social and technical) to operate from that source, it can be difficult. When creating codesign space with members of a formal or traditional organization, they come with the mentality that experts are the best (and perhaps only) people equipped to know how to assess and respond to a challenge. In this mentality, only academics have time to think, only corporations have access to resources, and only people who have been in the field for decades can see patterns. Often, because of the constructs around being an expert or specialist, people considered as such have had difficulty finding cohorts. In fact, you’re often actively discouraged away from it – anyone who shares your field is a competitor for limited resources. Any remotely collaborative activity is done asynchronously and piecemeal, cobbled together later by yet another specialist. This backdrop should indicate the importance of providing safe and guiding space for learning collaborative methods to those coming from traditional sectors. Here’s how I’ve done collaborative space-making in the past.

First, we must understand the codesign methods we aim to use by making it safe and inviting to work collaboratively, and ways to ask questions and with the expectation of listening. We call this “holding space,” through facilitation methods of encouraging inclusivity like paying attention to equal speaking time and accessbility of language. Within this space, we set a North Star, the purpose of the group. Frame all conversations and problem solving trajectories by that North Star.

With the Field Innovation Team (FIT) for FEMA’s Hurricane Sandy response, our North Star was “helping members of the affected population.” This might seem obvious, but formal organizations have been set up to help the official response organizations – Office of Emergency Management, or Red Cross, or the local police department. This has happened in the past because of scaling issues of knowledge and delivery abilities. Any situational knowledge was based upon limited aerial imagery (difficult and expensive), people who were in the area but are now able to report by being in an office (stale information), and past experience (misaligned patterns).

With things like crowd mapping, a higher resolution of situational awareness is possible. People on the ground can tell you where they are and what they see. With this ability comes a new responsibility, to deliver response at a similar resolution. This setup also includes an ability to directly interact with members of the affected population, so it’s important to refocus our efforts on our end users.

Any time any question came up, or any difficulties got in our way, we reminded ourselves about our main objective. From this, we immediately saw many paths to achieving the objective such as education, housing, heat, and connectivity. Through skill and connection discovery, we determined what the best focuses were, based on the team members present. We were already collaborating – by focusing on a main objective, and outlining various ways of achieving that objective, people start to consider how they can offer ways of getting there. Too often, we delineate our jobs and then figure out what we can do – which would have limited our creativity by leaps and bounds.

This is when it’s important to have a slew of collaborative tools in your back pocket. What will kick up this new track of collaboration with productivity? Just as importantly, what will be so easy to use that your newly-fledged collaborators won’t trip over install processes or learning curves, losing this precious momentum towards beautiful new worlds? I really like etherpad, hackpad, or google docs as a starting point for this: nearly everyone uses a word processor, and it’s immediately evident as to what is going on. Suddenly, there is a shared view! The common problem of resolving differences across multiple word documents has disappeared in this setting! Reports begin to write themselves out of meeting notes! Butterflies and bluejays are frolicking in the sky. Be wary that during this part of the process, it is important to both make sure people understand what is going on, while also not becoming their administrator. Help people put their own information into the platform, don’t do it for them when they stumble. Other great platforms are trello, basecamp, and loomio for near-immediate recognition of usefulness. People will sometimes stumble in the transition – simply take their recent update on the old method (email, anyone?) and continue the discussion on the new collaborative platform.

Once that objective is set, everything else is just problem solving. Things which would have kept us waiting to act instead became new opportunities to try things out.

Back in New York, the Joint Forces Office wouldn’t allow the FIT team in, because not all of us were federal employees, a few of us were foreign, and some of us were *cough* activists */cough*. Instead of twiddling our thumbs, we instead worked from the apartment of a friend-of-mine. They had better (and more open) internet, far superior coffee, and great serendipity liklihood. While working from there, we linked the OccupySandy volunteering map into the Google Crisis Map and (unofficially) chatted with UNICEF about what options we hadn’t yet looked at for resources. The neutral space allowed us to accomplish far more than we would have in the official offices. It also meant that as we tried out collaborative tools, firewalls didn’t get in our way. When we were later welcomed into the official offices for their first-ever design jam (with Frog Design!), the indignation about Basecamp and hackpad not loading was so great that the FEMA firewalls are now on different settings!

Remember that people are delicate. What most people in the formal sector have been missing for a long time is the ability to SPEAK and to ACT, just on a different vector than those in historically marginalized populations. We are asking all parties in the codesign process to be active and engaged. In distributed and collaborative spaces, this is something we excel in. It is therefore our responsibility to show all newcomers how awesome it can be. Stand with them to make more space. Sometimes as manifest in blanket forts.

Nairobi (1/2)

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I’ve just been to Nairobi for my first time, Kenya for my first time, Africa for my first time. The 3 days before the trip, I stressed about travel in a way I haven’t for at least a year, pacing and unpacking and repacking my bag. Ethan sitting me down to frankly say “your equals are in Nairobi, and if you fail to see that, it is on you. They could be doing the work they do anywhere, and they choose to do it there. Don’t stress. It will be incredible. I’m so excited you’re going.” SJ asking me in my anxiety what I had packed, me saying the same things as always, him insisting I include small things for my pockets. I looked at him blankly. I only have the essentials on me, always. “Get candy,” he says, “something they won’t have there. Dum-dums are great.”

18ish hours of flying later, I found a pink-haired Lindsay outside the ad hoc airport (the other one burned down), our presentation already garnering surprised but approving response. We caught up in the back of the taxi, new smells and tree shapes and stories from the driver. A long ride later, we happened upon new friends Steven (Mercy Corps) and Per (Standby Task Force) and Amean (International Organization for Migration), soon not only being good tobacco and booze friends upon arrival to our hotel, but also cohorts in response and making the world suck less.

We spent the next 3 days at the UN Compound for the International Conference of Crisis Mappers. Which was beautiful, but still a compound. The only chance we had to be outside the short walk there in the morning, the way back being a taxi ride in the dark. I had another amazing chance to draw things, and we had a chance to call ourselves out, which I think we failed to do. At long last, someone dedicated to security held a session – Gillo from Tactical Tech. 3 people showed up, and two were Lindsay and myself. I am deeply upset with this group of people I otherwise have so much respect for.

bird1 bird2But we are taken care of in physical security, escaping to nearby dinner and drinks via shared buses. Shaddrock’s toast to those who work within the system (himself included), the swimming upstream and constant trials. And to the volunteers, who truly are changing things. We all laughed, and drank, and ate. We all made a point of talking to new people, Lindsay apparently taking that to mean making new bird friends, and encountering a bird as tall as she is. In attempting to feed it some bread, she then threw said bread roll at it when it threatened her. We drew a profile of it for the internets, Mark, SJ, Lindsay and myself escalating on Twitter across timezones.

Running away early the last day, no longer able to handle the compound, to vibrant Pawa254. Sitting on the roof, chatting to members of a band about the sort of music they make, and cracking jokes about creatures, Lindsay doing startlingly close interpretive dance for a Beta Fish. Seeing Bankslave’s work and plans, the celebration of Toilet Day. Sitting back downstairs at the table, drinking beer and chatting about crypto while we wait to be ready for the taxi.

The experience of just having to wait, and of slowly dying inside because time is one of the few ways I know of to clearly indicate care. Having to accept that the pace that our hosts moved at was the pace everyone else moved at, feeling indignant on their behalf was patronizing to them and stressful only for me.

The astounding, unexpected hosting of Sasha, who booked us amazing and kind drivers, and things to do, and suggested the perfect people to meet without blinking an eye. As Lindsay and I reunited with her at the iHub on our last day, Lindsay suggested she’s like the US Ambassador, but we ended up agreeing she’s much more Internet Ambassador.

The Digital Humanitarian Network Summit in the beautiful 88MPH, an utterly unmarked coworking space somewhere along Ngong Road, just like everything else. The security guards at the gate of the center shrugging when we asked them what the area was called, and how we could get other people to it. Everyone excited for a chance to get to know each other deeper, and to get work done, and to address hard problems. Jus holding space not only for her own self, and organizations, but also for the internet. And initiating a totally amazing way of considering the Network, and how we can be an actual Network, and not just a group of organizations which can be called upon by the same point of contact. And local folk showing up, and making their voices heard, and telling us what we need to do to be useful to groups they represent. They came into a foreign environment, and thrived.DHN_2_of_2

And beer, and dancing, and live music at the end of the second day. A foie burger and surprise 2-for-1 beers, immediately shared. The locals giving us long looks while we belted out the songs, got the dance floor going, talked louder than we probably needed to. Rejoicing to be done with compounds and enforced productivity. 5 days straight of conference, finally done, accomplished and exhausted.

Lindsay as a fantastic traveling partner, always on top of logistics, enthusiastic, and willing to try new things. Dragging me away from keyboard and closed curtains onto safari, us both being excited enough to continue on to Kibera later that day.

Dublin Hacks Presentations!

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We had a bunch of great projects presented at Dublin Hacks. Here are the details on their specs and focus.

Search and Rescue
S&R has the aspect of integrating smartphones with a central system, with volunteers on an open source map. They are creating an Android app to server communications. Users can search for and see where other searchers have been. The API being built has the capacity to input data via phone. The team is currently working on getting data into the formal database, but not all the paths are properly linked yet. Stay tuned for a fully mapped database soon. S&R are planning for the app to be shown to emergency managers and fire department personnel to facilitate a discussion on what can be viably accomplished in an afternoon at a four person sized team in roundtable problem solving. Additional plans include plug-and-play capabilities for myriad emergency scenarios. If the project continues, the team will test run the app on senior emergency officer’s phones. If this app is downloaded and used in other scenarios, please credit back to S&R.

Black Hole
The team ran into some challenges with their geocoding project; Not as many tweets are geocoded as was previously assumed. In terms of numbers, only 1% of tweets are geocoded. This makes extracting meaningful content and data is extremely difficult. Black Hole used Datasift to flesh out twitter data from around Ireland for the past few hours (15k geocoded tweets on the date of pull). The app also has a ton of thought put into visualizations; Colors are hashtags, and provide an easily parsed at-a-glance over a the course of the hours of data pull. Density of tweets is also viewable vuia heat map. Black Hole can also extrapolate normalization of the data trends over time, which provides insight into data black holes. The team is researching and integrating historical data with future plans to test against known events with black holes. Powermap was used in Excel to handle the data. Additional plans include world domination through selling this data, potential to Twitter for the purposes of humanitarian reporting and parsing.

Etherpad Wiki
While coordinating digital responders during disaster releif efforts, it’s difficult to figure out who is doing what and where, etc. Part of a solution to this issue is a wiki of pads, with the capability to create collections for individual disasters. The top level page is a pad hosted on one of the following platforms: hacked, mopped, etherpad, etc. The root page will be a static version of the pad content. In terms of updates, link adds inside the content spurs creation of a link tree from the collection page. When clicking edit or collaborate buttons, users are forwarded to currently up and live pads. Every few minutes, these pads are saved as static page. As a point of reference and redundancy, multiple copies of pads exist across a network, but only one is in use at a time. The future vision of the project includes distributed document storage and editing engine, with a root node page and script mirroring content from as many locations as possible.

Shelter
The Shelter team focused not on software, but on building physical resources with cheap, available materials to provide insulating protection against the elements. Using cardboard boxes and a vessel containing a human body’s worth of hot water, the team was able to simulate body temperature and heat loss by taking temperature readings at intervals. By adding a layer of tinfoil, they were able to significantly increase levels of insulation. On the ground, people will be able to take these commonly available materials to keep themselves warm. The Shelter plan depends on how many people need shelter, and the is cost based on that need. Plans for future implementation include how to waterproof materials. The team is looking into previous efforts on creating a cardboard canoe waterproof by soaking the cardboard in varnish.

Device Finder
The team is developing a tool for locating people in building collapse scenarios via device location. The premise of the project is that if the phone is working and findable, the person is also probably alive. Device Finder is working on triangulating location based on phone signal. The National Institute for Standards did tests in 2005 with radio transmitters and detected that building debris is a good blocker of RF. In order for the solution to work, the base station has to ping the device, and a WiFi network needs to be available. The device will connect to the strongest signal source, so if strong access points are nearby, phones will try to connect. The team plans to work on the project at Science Hack Day Dublin in the Spring.

Many thanks to TOG Dublin for being amazing hosts, to Tropo for supporting the event, and to Lisha for ordering us delicious food from 5 timezones away.

College To Careers

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I had the joy of visiting my hometown of Logansport, Indiana recently. In fact, I’m still sitting at the kitchen table, under skylights. Might have just finished dancing like a muppet with my father to adamant piano music. I came primarily to see my parents, but also to see how my aunt is settling into Grandma’s old house, and how the forrest of magical privilege1 is growing. My mother also asked me to speak to the Rotary club. Which is amazing. As you may know, I see service, especially to one’s less-well-off origins, as an important component of maintaining the social fabric.

Which of course meant I couldn’t just talk to Rotary. I also reached out to the high school principal. Could I come and speak to some classes? Some perusal of the high school schedule later, I had some classes picked out. I’d present to the Advanced Placement Speech Class and all of the 8th graders at one of the two middle schools.

First, I landed from Ireland via Chicago2, hugged my parents, took my melatonin, and passed out. I woke in the morning, nervous but excited to head to the high school. I remembered the route from my house, driving my mother’s car like ye olde days.

I sometimes have these dreams where I’m back in high school, and I’m running late. Never naked, I suppose because I don’t care, but often late. Well. That actually happened. I arrived into the parking lot, a full 20 minutes before the class started, to an email that said “Hope you’re ok, sad to miss you in class.” Dear timezones. Dear, dear timezones. Drat.

Rotary was another matter. We ate, I caught up with friends’ parents, I talked about technology and collaboration and disaster response. The response was “we’re still not quite sure what you do, but we’re impressed!” Sigh. I must get better at this! I rewrote the presentation, laid it out differently, and prepared myself for the next day, with 6 rounds of 8th graders in a class called College to Careers.

Then, I took questions. Any question. One class was stuck on “hacking,” one on “celebrities,” but nearly all the questions were good ones. Once it became clear that I mean “any question,” more interesting ones started coming. “Why is your hair blue?” – because it’s supposed to be. “Why do you wear a tie?” – because it looks good. “What’s the worst place you’ve ever been?” – looking for invisible populations in Far Rockaway that we knew would freeze to death because they were scared to be seen. “What’s your favorite color?” – grey. “50 Shades of Grey?” – terrible fanfic of a terrible book. “Twilight?” – yup. *Gasp*

Each class had its own flavor. A blind kid was incredibly adept at translating into “kid speak.” Another, pink hair and poised nature, wanted to know where I went shopping. Two kids and I riffed about motorcycles, and how they were terrifically dangerous and here’s my scar but of course I still have one, but wait until you know how to sit still before you think about getting one yourself. And the instructor was incredibly gracious about me essentially telling kids who had signed up to a class for clear purpose and direction that I was still winging it (and loving it).

It was a great opportunity, and I’m glad to have a better understanding of what I do. Maybe other people will now, too. At least 120 kids out there are thinking that “hack” might not be a bad word.

1. My parents have taken to buying lots on their block that tend to be held by negligent landlords, tearing down the house, and planting trees. While this is a rather strange form of gentrification, as you can still easily get a house in any area of my hometown for under $30,000, I don’t feel so bad about it.
2. The first flight Diggz and I have ever been on together in 3 years of traveling!

Three Year Anniversary GWOBcast

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As of October 10th, Geeks Without Bounds is no longer in our Terrible Twos! As we move into our third year of humanitarian technology work, we’d like to thank our generous program sponsors who have helped us develop both as a company and as contributors in the humanitarian field.

Tropo Logo

Tropo and Splunk, we would not exist if not for you. You make sure our rent is paid, our brains are full, and new opportunities are constantly coming our way. We love you ever so much.

…and of course, our friends and family (who we’re sure are quite sick of hearing us talk about our glorious jobs all the time). Your support is invaluable, your feedback appreciated, and your love returned many times over.

Without any further ado, our birthday GWOBcast! Enjoy. We’re off to play with noisemakers and wear party hats.

Open Humanitarian Code Sprint Overview

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OHI purpose

The Open Humanitarian Initiative strives to revolutionize how information is shared in humanitarian response by engaging nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, private sector technology companies, donors and governments in a shared vision that advocates for open data.
Code sprint
To enact this purpose, OHI hosted a code sprint to bring together individuals from a variety of mapping, data, decision-making, and networking expertise. The attendees explored how their existing work could overlap and support one another’s efforts, and what new things they could build together. We had two locations – Washington, DC area and Birmingham, England. The DC event was hosted by ESRI at their Vienna, Virginia location. The England event happened in conjunction with Maptember and Aston University’s H4D2 program.

The Teams

Briar : The Briar project is building secure communication tools to enable journalists, activists and civil society groups to communicate safely without fear of government interference. Our open source mobile and desktop apps will provide a secure, easy-to-use alternative to email, blogs and message boards, where users can exchange private messages with their contacts, create their own blogs and message boards, and subscribe to blogs and boards their contacts have shared.

ESRI inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them.

George Washington University : Department of Engineering Management & Systems Engineering and Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management.

MapAction : MapAction’s service is unique. It’s the only non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a capacity to deploy a fully trained and equipped humanitarian mapping and information management team anywhere in the world, often within just hours.

Sahana: The Sahana platform is a versatile open source toolkit for building custom humanitarian solutions. It is used by Disaster Management agencies ariound the globe and supported by a 501s non-profit foundation.

Taarifa : The Taarifa Platform is a resilient open source application for helping cities or groups of people fix their plumbing and do similar infrastructure management tasks — like a github for the real world. It allows people to collect, share, and visualise their own stories and problems using various mediums, like SMS, web forms, email or Twitter.

Ushahidi : We are a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We’re a disruptive organization that is willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing the traditional way that information flows.

The Outputs

MapAction working on automating things
Karen got some Java questions answered
Sahana built out a Who What Where tool for the Syria scenario

Joined Efforts

  • Karen’s expertise lent to prioritization things and big picture
  • Dr. Gralla and Brandon Greenberg provided a better understanding of the system of humanitarian response, as well as informed the group on decision making processes.
  • MapAction and Ushahidi were able to share data structures such that Ushahidi deployments will involve the exceptional categorizations MapAction has come up with. This means easier use of Ushahidi by their far-flung participatory mapping community as well as easier data sharing between MapAction and Ushahidi. This is awesome because MapAction is usually based on official data sources, which are limited though verifiable, and Ushahidi gives a more bottom-up, adaptive understanding of a situation. With their powers combined, a more holistic view of an incident should be formed.
  • Taarifa, tho lightweight enough for developing areas, is still reliant upon a department to receive and respond to incoming reports. By visioning what a distributed instance, built on top of Briar, would look like, we were able to see a city with citizens capable of addressing many of the issues outside the capability or pervue of the city. One person can report an issue, and another can fix it. The workflow looks a bit like this:

Lessons Learned

While we all might agree that sharing of data and working together are noble purposes worth persuing, doing the actual work is a difficult sell. Taking time away from our worthwhile daily endeavors to try new things and meet new people is a big ask. We were honored to have the company of the folk who could attend, and hope it was worth their while. Making it possible to take more time, and removing the barriers to participation, is arguably the biggest part of holding events such as these.

What’s Next

Seeing how the data structures and connective tissues of Taarifa transfer into a disaster scenario. We often wonder about state changes, and having an existing knowledge of an area. A community map created in the long disasters of sanitation and health issues would prove useful in fast disasters such as earthquakes and mudslides as well.
Briar Taarifa test deployments in developed cities. Looking for seed funding to get that up and going, spec out a 2 and 5 year plan.